Survival reached at Czech oncology patients.

Overview

In August 2007, an international study EUROCARE-4 published for the Czech Republic decreased probability of 5-year survival in comparison with average value of the other involved European countries. These findings were refused as strongly biased by leaders of the Czech Oncology Society. The bias however cannot be attributed to the EUROCARE study itself, it was due to erroneous and not representative export of the Czech data. Data of the Czech NCR can guarantee representative monitoring of mortality with 100% population coverage. Instead of it, the EUROCARE-4 study obtained only partial export of regionally based data with only 8% coverage. The situation inevitably resulted in strongly biased outcome that cannot be generalized for the whole population. Here we present audit of more than 1.3 million of records accessible in the NCR since 1977. Based on reference period 1995 – 2003, we estimated 5-year relative survival in the way that methodically corresponds to the EUROCARE-4 study. The results clearly document that survival outcomes reached by current Czech oncology are comparable to those reported in the EUROCARE-4 study.

Key words:
population cancer registry, overall survival, reference benchmarking of survival